Yale To Investigate After Student Says He Was Held At Gunpoint By Campus Police

Yale To Conduct Internal Investigation After Student Held At Gunpoint By Campus Police

Yale University says the school's police will conduct an internal investigation into an encounter between police and a student on Saturday that has gained national attention since the student's father wrote about it in The New York Times.

The student told his father that he was detained at gunpoint and ordered to lie on the ground.

"During the efforts to locate and detain the suspect, a Yale College student, who closely matched the description of the suspect, was briefly detained and released by Yale police," Yale said in a statement Saturday. After the student was released, "a suspect, who was seen fleeing Trumbull College [a Yale residential college], was arrested shortly thereafter … and will be charged with felony burglaries."

The Yale student's father, Charles Blow, a columnist at The New York Times, said in a column Monday that his son told him he was held at gunpoint and ordered to the ground.

Yale says an internal review will be conducted by the chief's office of the Yale Police Department.

"The dean of Yale College and the campus police chief have apologized and promised an internal investigation, and I appreciate that. But the scars cannot be unmade. My son will always carry the memory of the day he left his college library and an officer trained a gun on him," Blow said in his column, which was also published by The Courant.

He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to check the status of a book...

(CHARLES M. BLOW, The New York Times)

"Now, don't get me wrong: If indeed my son matched the description of a suspect, I would have had no problem with him being questioned appropriately," Blow wrote. "…The stop is not the problem; the method of the stop is the problem. Why was a gun drawn first? Why was he not immediately told why he was being detained? Why not ask for ID first?"

In an email sent to the Yale community on Monday, Yale President Peter Salovey, Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway and Yale police Chief Ronnell Higgins wrote that many in the Yale community "felt personal pain upon reading accounts of this incident on social media and in the press as they saw national debates about race, policing, and the use of force become a very local and personal story. We share these feelings and recognize that the interest in and reaction to this incident underscore that the work of making our campus and our society more inclusive, just, and safe remains an imperative for all of us."

The email continued: "Let us be clear: we have great faith in the Yale Police Department and admire the professionalism that its officers display on a daily basis to keep our campus safe. What happened on Cross Campus on Saturday is not a replay of what happened in Ferguson; Staten Island; Cleveland; or so many other places in our time and over time in the United States. The officer, who himself is African American, was responding to a specific description relayed by individuals who had reported a crime in progress."

"Even though the officer's decision to stop and detain the student may have been reasonable, the fact that he drew his weapon during the stop requires a careful review," the email said.

For that reason, the email said, the internal affairs unit of the Yale Police Department is conducting a "thorough and expeditious investigation of the circumstances surrounding the incident."

The email suggested that the Yale community should "seize the moment as an opportunity to reflect, learn and grow. There are real challenges where the lines of race, inequality, and policing intersect, and we as teachers, students, and citizens must face them. These are not just someone else's issues, located somewhere else; they are America's issues, and they are our issues."

Laurence Grotheer, a spokesman for New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, said he did not think that Harp would want to comment on the situation out of respect for the Yale Police Department. "The Yale Police Department is doing the investigation," Grotheer said. "That has been the mayor's position to date."

Grotheer noted that the Yale Police Department is "an autonomous law enforcement agency," separate from the New Haven Police Department, although the agencies often work together.